Blending Tradition with Innovation: Rethinking the Lecture in the Digital Age (part 1)
Summary
Critiques traditional lectures for inefficiency in promoting deep learning and retention.
Argues for a benefit of lectures for socialisation and instilling discipline.
Highlights the potential of integrating technology (e.g., videos, AI tools) with lectures for a more engaging and effective learning experience.
Concludes with a call to reassess and adapt teaching methods to the modern educational landscape, ensuring lectures contribute positively to student learning.
When people ask you what your job title is, how do you reply? For many years I would have said ‘lecturer’ but now I would say ‘academic’. Why the change? Firstly, because most of my family and friends think that teaching is the entirety of my job, whereas actually I am writing such interesting things as you are currently reading. Secondly, and more pertinently it is because lectures are pretty rubbish, and having a job title based on something rubbish isn’t great.
Do I really mean it when I say lectures are rubbish? Yes, I do, they are rubbish. Rubbish in the sense that if were picking a method for getting students to learn something from the range of options available to us, something that looks like a lecture would be about bottom of the list.
Nevertheless, I am going to argue that there are two good reasons to still have lectures, socialisation and discipline.
Firstly, let’s establish what a lecture is. A lecture is typically a large group of students (normally everyone on the course), in a room together for one or two hours, listening to the lecturer explain some ideas. The lecturer will normally have some slides to help.
There are various modifications you can make to this basic structure (more on this later....) but the essence remains the same, a teacher doing a lot of talking, a bunch of students doing a lot of listening.
Almost all of the reasons that lectures are bad for learning are summarised in this article by Gibbs (1981) which examines all defences of lectures and presents strong counterarguments.
Highlights include:
“The pace at which the lecturer is talking, may well be faster than the rate at which she can make sense of what is said and she has no control over this. If something is misunderstood she may have to accept that little of what follows can be made sense of. If you wanted to deliberately interfere with someone’s thinking, one effective way of doing it would be to talk at them continuously whilst demanding their attention.”
" I am perfectly willing to accept that Polytechnics have their share of excellent lecturers. But it is hardly credible that we are all above average. Indeed with our history of practically no training courses whatsoever it would be surprising if we were not, overall, somewhat worse than average. And students would have me believe that some of us are very much worse than average.”
“Many lecturers are simply unaware of even the existence of evidence on the use of lectures, let alone what conclusions the evidence leads to. However, many of the clearest findings are easy enough to observe in one's own teaching: students’ lack of attention after half an hour, the inadequacy of their notes, their poor memory for the content of the lecture evident in subsequent tutorials and their even poorer understanding. It sometimes surprises me that more lecturers haven’t spontaneously abandoned lecturing as a consequence of their everyday experience, regardless of their ignorance of the literature.”
“Lecturing is a symptom of self-importance.”
It is notable that this was written before I was born, yet 20 years after it was written I would be sitting in a lecture theatre with 200 other students frantically scribbling down notes as the lecturer write masses of information on a giant chalkboard for an hour! Rather illustrating the point I have made before that academics can be rather slow to pick up on ideas about teaching best-practice.
Are things very different now?
One point Gibbs gives for why lectures are still popular (in 1981) is the tradition of an hour-long lecture. Gibbs argues that attention spans do not hold up for a whole hour and so large amounts of a lecture will be quickly forgotten. The idea of a tradition is an important one here, are we still lecturing simply because this is how it has always been done? In particular we produce our own videos and can curate from the large number of online videos available on almost every topic. Why lecture when videos that can be watched at the student’s convenience, can be paused, can be edited to ensure accuracy, and can be broken into smaller and more approachable chunks are now so readily available?
On this last point, evidence backs up that videos should be short in order to reduce cognitive load and focus on the most important information. Some recommendations are for videos to be shorter than ten minutes, further highlighting the weakness of the use of overlong lectures that are kept that way largely due to institutional inertia and convenience.
Similarly both Gibbs, and White (2010) highlight the argument that ‘lectures are good for getting facts across’. He argues this was unlikely to be true in 1981, with the ease of access to high quality videos, web resources and AI, this is certainly not the case today.
I would argue that the case against lectures is stronger now than it was 40 years ago. With widely available videos both produced by the relevant course academics as well as those publicly available online, with the abundance of online reading resources, and with AI, the relative effectiveness of a lecture appears to be very low.
At my institution (De Montfort University in the UK) we have undergone recent changes in our teaching delivery style, from a system where 6-8 hours of lectures a week was normal, to one where two hours of in-person lectures and two hours of video delivered lectures is the norm. We have moved away from lectures to a large degree, but still retain them as part of our delivery. Was this the right thing to do, should we have gone further?
The best defence of lecturing may come from empirical evidence showing that it might not make much difference how a course is delivered (as much evidence often finds for educational interventions). If in the end it doesn’t matter either way, and lectures are relatively low cost, then why not continue doing them?
Schwerdt and Wupperman (2011) offer an empirical defence of traditional teaching methods that include lectures. By regressing test scores on a wide array of controls for teacher and student characteristics as well as the percentage of time spent with a lecture-style delivery in the classroom compared to other styles, the authors find that increases in lecture time are associated with better test scores. The authors are cautious in interpreting their results, suggesting that the specific implementation of different teaching strategies matters a lot. This evidence is in a school context rather than university, but offers some strong evidence that lecturing cannot be so easily dismissed purely on grounds of educational effectiveness.
As a counter to this I would argue that even if there is little difference in educational outcomes, traditional lectures are about the least fun way to spend an hour or two, and we should look to do something more enjoyable anyway. White (2010) argues that as well as not fostering deep understanding of material, and likely inducing only a short-term memorisation of some key facts, lectures are too often simply boring. Presenting material in a more interesting way can be crucial to encouraging student participation, which is necessary precondition for having an effective lecture session.
Some evidence suggests that students themselves prefer lectures, partly for the reasons of discipline and structure that I will now expand on.
The case against lectures is not as clear cut as it may initially seem, but I believe we are right to retain scepticism of how useful (and enjoyable) a lecture will be. The probability that many of our students will retain significant information or otherwise have a good educational experience should not be considered to be zero but should be low.
Despite their weaknesses, I believe that we should be using a small amount of lecturing in our courses despite the other alternatives, and specifically despite the advantages of videos complemented by AI as a study resource. The two hours a week that our students at De Montfort University currently have feels close to the correct amount. This is due to two advantages that lectures have over the use of videos.
Firstly, lectures offer a structure that videos and other methods of self-teaching do not. At university students are largely responsible for managing their own time and workload, but having some hours a week that are timetabled for a specific time and place where they will gather with the course leader and their peers offers something important.
Looking at data on when student access recordings and other online resources can be quite eye-opening, with access in the middle of the night, at weekends and in the holidays perfectly common. Whilst there is nothing necessarily wrong with this, having a lecture at a social hour as part of a more standard daily schedule seems likely to help some students who struggle to create a good working routine otherwise.
Note that this argument is different from the one discussed by Gibbs, who argues against the idea that students do not do work if they do not have timetabled sessions. My argument is not that students will not do work, but that when they do the work can matter. Though I do not expect there to be any very large effect on learning and the quality of work produced, there is simply a social function of having a routine that is more in tune to one that students may (hopefully) have in their later lives.
More importantly, the social function of lectures in a different sense is that of interaction with their peers and with the academic leading the session.
If your lecture is just you talking, and students listening, with no interaction between anyone, then even with the argument for having some timetabled structure, you may as well have asked them to listen to some videos.
At a minimum your session needs to give students the ability to interact directly with you, which is probably the most obvious weakness of a video in comparison. With the emergence of AI, this advantage is not as strong as it was however, students can get answers to many questions very directly and there is the possibility to create course specific AI resources that can mimic what the academic can offer to a large degree.
Therefore, the real strength of a lecture is in one that fosters interaction between the students in a way that takes advantage of the large numbers in the room, a unique experience compared to small group teaching, office hours, and individual study.
In part 2 I will discuss in more detail the specific strategies that can be used, with some examples and discussion of more academic work and evidence around this. For now, let me set out some practical tips based on the discussion in this essay:
Firstly think about the current balance you have between lectures, videos, workshops, seminars and other activities. Does the current balance look to you like the right one for you and your students? If not, are you continuing with this out of habit, convenience, or because it is centrally decided, and you have no power to change it? If it is the latter, then perhaps you have an opportunity to put the case to those with the power to change it. If not, then change what is within your power to change.
Secondly, when are your lectures timetabled? If the benefit of a lecture is the social element of a large group and plenty of interaction, then you need the students to actually be there. Kelly (2010) finds results for poor attendance from the previous literature are to do with timetabling, with early and late lectures, and those on Mondays and Fridays likely to have lower attendance. However this study finds that time and day do not matter other than that Fridays have lower attendance. Again you may not have much direct power over this, but if you can get your lectures on a day other than Friday, that might help.
Make sure the part of your lecture that is just you talking and students are listening is good. You have a clear structure that aligns well with the rest of the course, you speak clearly, and your slides or other visual support are well-presented.
I have a GPT that can help you with this, and will have a post soon explaining more about this. https://chat.openai.com/g/g-YLILhARM7-lecture-coach
Make the session active, which will be the subject of part 2 in this series.
